ART IS CLOSE TO RELIGION
Thomas Kinkade and Howard Terpning are two illustrations of how thin the line between popular art and conventional religion can be. Both portray idealized but imaginary scenes with great appeal. They radically differ in their lifestyles, Kinkade purporting to be religious though he was an out-of-control drunk and Terpning representing himself as a great sympathizer and even participant in the lives of the Plains Indians of the 19th century before white contact. Both enjoy great loyalty from fans.
Kinkade is easy to dismiss as a raging nutcase who hit upon a Barnum style scam. Terpning is harder to dismiss. In fact, both Bob Scriver and Darrell Robes Kipp fell under the spell of his gorgeous paintings and assumed the life from which they derived was a dimension of their own.
At a particular point in social history, illustrators began to lose their jobs with the popular slick magazines like the Saturday Evening Post. Terpning had a great gig painting movie posters, but even that was diminished by television. These highly skilled, realistic, often history-conscious painters (all men that I can think of off-hand), turned to easel painting and many happened upon the genre of “Western art.” (This is in contrast to Kinkade’s cozy English category which is Eastern.) Today YouTube is still full of interviews with Terpning about his affinity and love of Plains Indians, often sponsored by galleries or magazines.
Here’s a nice short and friendly version of the basics.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A__eudk058I Terpning knows very well that no contemporary Plains Indian tribe is nomadic, or lives in tipis, etc. but slips into speaking as though they were in that literary, anthropological, imaginary place. The naive believe it.
To lend his work authenticity he does field work and thus came to Browning. I was no longer there, hadn’t been for a long time — lucky thing, because I bristle — but both Bob Scriver and Darrell Robes Kipp became entangled with him and with each other in awkward ways because of Terpning demands. Why am I so resistant?
As far as I’m concerned these two “art” genres, the English cozy home cottage and the noble “Indian” life on the prairie are both memes or bubbles or self-contained assumptions akin to religion, quite as unreal and resistant to criticism as the Edwardian Christian religious context of a wise and loving old man floating in the black vacuum of the Cosmos or his son dying on a cross while loving everyone personally. When I’ve challenged some Christian pastors at ecumenical conferences, they get wet eyes and quivering mouths. They say it is a “belief” that cannot be questioned.
The point of these systems is what some call industrial capitalism, that is, gathering people into groups based on their understanding of the world that subsequently yield income for those lucky enough to define and conduct the business of BBC-type sentimentality or Clint Eastwood macho modes. I have sympathy for both paradigms but have left them as “faith” statements, in part because these complexes of galleries, publishers, universities of the West, books, magazines, movies, historical societies, and databases have overplayed their hand.
Though from the beginning I thought Terpning’s pretty paintings were unreal, even after I was gone in 1973 (divorced in 1970 but I didn’t leave until my replacement moved in), I was reacting more to the way he used this imaginary world to make himself important and rich. In the process he more or less plundered Bob Scriver’s life at a time when he was aging and brain-damaged from hypoxia during a heart attack he had while we were married. His personality was narrowed.
Darrell Robes Kipp could defend himself, but he was also privately aware that one way to fund the Piegan Institute was through the fantasies about indigenous people at a time before any living white people knew them. His challenge was to find the abiding truth of who the “People” really are and can persist, in the middle of a welter of feedback loops from historical anthro papers, contemporary aspiring grad students, oral tradition both true and untrue, and a growing world of art created by indigenous people that proceeded parallel to the potencies of the Western white cowboy tropes. The noble and peaceful but still macho man.Cynical de-romanticizing movements emphasizing the filth, poverty and murderous prejudice of the frontier that was supposed to be the source of all this enchantment only made the aficionados clutch it more closely to their breasts and buy more stuff.
Reaching out for more material to feed the materialism, the galleries and curators picked up the grand vistas of the landscape admirers and their connection to patriotism, feeding into the romanticism of mountains and deserts which cause people to stand gasping and declaring, “how beautiful”, while allowing resource empire corporations to plunder the land so that one can drive by the Sweetgrass Hills, the misnamed refugia on the US/Canadian border (it is properly called “SweetPINE” — sweetgrass grows in swampy places, not hills) and see the great bull-dozer scoops made by people searching for gold. They know there IS gold there. Gold Butte got its name from a gold mine.
Both cowboys and Indians are gold-miners, looking for precious identity to justify tough life-threatening existence. They find it in history, mysticism, camaraderie, patriotism, and the occasional wealth of individuals who played their cards right. At least they claim that’s how they got rich.
Kinkade was a fool of a well-known kind and even those who knew it found it hard to resist the repetitive invocation of the little house where the light is left on the windowsill to guide a person home. The image has been used in stories as deep as family allegiance and the wish for some kind of haven where one is understood and protected.
Terpning, in his professional YouTube videos, appears sincere and genuine, seems to know the back country because he paints it as glowingly as a Hollywood backlot. When Bob Scriver’s lawyer (the one who was replaced by a more avaricious and potent one who handled the estate) made a video of Bob, he looked like a foolish obsessed old man, which he was. But he was real. Just not so marketable. The interview vid was dropped. This one just shows the sculpture.
